How do bees make our favorite golden syrup, honey?! There’s quite a story behind that. Watch to find out!! #STEMvee
Transcript: Do you love the taste of honey? Delicious, right? Me too! But how exactly do bees create honey? There’s quite a story behind that. Honey is made from nectar (the surgary juice) that collects in the heart of the flowers. After finding a flower, bees dive in head-first, using their long, specially-adapted tongues to slurp tiny sips of nectar into one of two stomachs, called the honey stomach. A single bee might have to drink from more than a thousand flowers to fill its honey stomach, which can weigh as much as the bee itself when full of nectar. On the way back to the hive, digestive enzymes are already working to turn that nectar into honey. When she returns to the hive, the forager bee will pass the nectar into the mouth of another worker. That bee will pass it into another bee’s mouth, and so on. This game of regurgitation is an important part of the honey-making process, since each bee adds more digestive enzymes to turn long chains of complex sugars in the raw nectar into simple sugars like fructose and glucose. The bee will then drop watery nectar into wax cells, called honeycomb. They act like storage jars for the nectar. Because the nectar is still pretty watery, the bees will beat their wings and create an air current inside the hive to evaporate and thicken the nectar. Then, they will cap the cell with beeswax so the nectar can complete its transformation into honey. Because of its low water content and acidic pH, honey isn’t a very inviting place for bacteria or yeast spoilage. Why do bees make honey? They make honey as a way of storing food to eat over the winter, when there are fewer flowers from which to gather food. For one pound of honey, a hive of foraging bees will together fly more than 50,000 miles and they visit up to 2 million flowers! These tiny creatures are probably the hardest working organisms on the Earth and make one of the most delicious food!
